Setting up your first Gutenberg project

Gutenberg, the React-based WordPress editor, is available as a rapidly evolving plugin and as a core integration in WordPress, featuring block-based components for content creation and future site building. These blocks facilitate database content saving and user interaction, and plugins often bundle multiple blocks. The latest Gutenberg release includes a block directory for easy single-block plugin installation during editing. Developers can scaffold single-block plugins using tools like @wordpress/create-block, which generates necessary files and supports the block directory by providing a predefined configuration customizable with webpack, Babel, and ESLint. For multi-block plugins, developers create separate block folders and adapt the main plugin file to include all blocks. Additionally, wp-env simplifies the setup of a local WordPress environment using Docker, facilitating plugin development with customizable parameters in the .wp-env.json file. This new setup, along with emerging tools, reduces the complexity of Gutenberg projects, previously requiring extensive knowledge of React, JavaScript, and other modern technologies, and enables faster development cycles with tools like Hot Module Replacement.